LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON LIBRARY ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

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http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/biopage.asp GEORGE REEDY ORAL HISTORY, INTERVIEW VI PREFERRED CITATION

For Internet Copy: Transcript, George Reedy Oral History Interview VI, 5/23/83, by Michael L. Gillette, Internet Copy, LBJ Library.

For Electronic Copy on Compact Disc from the LBJ Library: Transcript, George Reedy Oral History Interview VI, 5/23/83, by Michael L. Gillette, Electronic Copy, LBJ Library.

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Legal Agreement Pertaining to the Oral History Intervie~"s of George E. Reedy In accordance with the provisions of Chapter 21 of Title 44, United States Code and subject to the terms and conditions hereinafter set forth, I, George E. Reedy of t4ilwaukee, Hisconsin do hereby give, donate and convey to the United States of America all my rights, title and interest in the tape recordings and transcripts of the personal interviews conducted on May 21, 1982 at r·lil'.'laukee, Wisconsin, October 27, 1982 at Dallas, Texas, and May 23 and 24, 1983 at Milwaukee, ·Wisconsin and .prepared for deposit in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library~ This assignment is subject to the follo"Jing terms and conditions: (1) The transcripts shall be available for use by researchers as soon as they have been deposited in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. (2) The tape recordings shall be available to those researchers who have access to the transcripts. (3) During my lifetime, I retain all copyright in the material gi ven to the Uni ted States by the terms of thi s instrumenL Thereafter, the copyright in both the transcripts and tape recordings shall pass to the United States government. During my lifetime, researchers· may publish brief IIfair use ll quotations from the transcripts and tape recordings without my express consent in each case. (4) Copies of the transcripts and tape recordings may be provided by the Library to researchers upon request. . (5) Copies of the transcripts and tape recordings may be deposited in or loaned to institutions other than the Lyndon Baines Johnson library.

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/' / ~(. \.~ Jt''/ ///~- . '.CA'/·~.)/ / I ./ /~ ..--./. Archi"V}7t 01 the United'States -b--tif, 19, It; (3 Date INTERVIEW VI DATE: May 23, 1983 INTERVIEWEE: GEORGE E. REEDY INTERVIEWER: Michael L. Gillette PLACE: Professor Reedy's office, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Tape 1 of 2 G: Before we get into a lot of the issues in 1954, there is enough of a talking point here on the press to ask you about these memoranda. R: Well, do you want the individual memoranda discussed? G: Sure, if you can remember them. R: Oh, sure, I remember most of them. Most of them are rather obvious memoranda. G: Well, why for example did he not want to have the television exposure of, say, Larry Spivak or something? R: Oh, that would have been very bad really at that particular point. The difficulty there, that was during a period when holding the Democratic Party together in the Senate was a very major problem, and almost anything that he said in public was going to lose somebody. Let's see, is there a date on that memorandum? It was-- G: It was early on, as I recall. R: Yes, it was very early. December 24, 1953. My God, the session hadn't even started then. You had, oh, I'd say roughly four divisions among the Senate Democrats. You had some of the far right, or some of the far segregationists, southern senators, and you had some of the Reedy -- VI -- 2 way-out liberals who were even to the left of [Hubert] Humphrey, people like [Estes] Kefauver. And you had the westerners. Then you had sort of some of the northern moderates, and they were all going in different directions. And all of them were very, very skeptical of the Johnson leadership. Johnson did not get the leadership because anybody thought he could handle it. I think about the only man who had confidence in his ability to handle it was Dick Russell, and Russell was right. But there was just nobody else. No liberal could have stepped into that position at that point without tearing the Democratic Party to pieces, and no conservative could have stepped into it at that point. Most of the other people that might be able to keep some semblance, say somebody like Mike Mansfield, simply did not have enough weight. The Democratic Party would not have fallen to pieces under Mike Mansfield or Ed Johnson, but it certainly wouldnlt have done anything either. And it was one of those situations where there was literally nowhere else to go. But he certainly had to prove himself. There was going to be a terribly difficult thing. I can still recall Mike Monroney of Oklahoma was pretty far to the left. When you say far to the left, 11m speaking of it in American terms; he wasnlt a communist or any­ thing like that. Mike was somewhat skeptical but said that everybody understood that Lyndon Johnson had problems, and once those problems arose he was going to get very extra help and forbearance from his colleagues. In other words, Mike thought that he would be so torn to pieces or torn by the southerners that he would have to be forgiven Reedy -- VI -- 3

for certain lapses as leader. And that was the way everybody was looking at him, that he was .. It occurred to very, very few people what a powerful man this was individually, as a person. I can still recall the shock that almost hit the Senate in the opening day of the session when Bob Taft ran into that brick wall that Johnson had set up on the division of the committee assignments. People just couldn't believe their eyes. He had to prove himself. It would have been very foolish for him to have gone on "Meet The Press" or any of those programs at that poi nt. What he needed, he needed a period of very intense negotiation with the individual members of the Senate on a face-to-face, man-to-man basis before he started taking any public stand. Public stands would have been deadly. He was right about that. And I wasn't pushing that Spivak thing either. G: So he generally had a policy against going on? R: Oh, sure. G: Okay. Now another theme that seems to run through these memoranda is a concern about individual stories and attempts to track down the source. R: Yes. At that particular--well, two things. First of all, he was always overly concerned about individual stories. That was one of his great weaknesses, both when he was a senator and later on when he became president. That man could go into almost a fit over things that he shouldn't even have noticed. I think part of that was because in those days the Texas press was a highly personalized press which Reedy -- VI -- 4 was very much under control of the individual publishers who were using their newspapers for political purposes. And Johnson had been accustomed to a world in which a publisher was either for you or against you, and if he was for you that meant that every single one of his news columns would be devoted to you. And if he was against you, that meant every single one of his news columns would be against you. And you know, the Texas press could go pretty far in those days. 1111 never forget the [William] Blakley-[Ra1ph] Yarborough campaign. You could have read the Texas press for weeks and not had the faintest idea that there was a man named Yarborough running. It was ridicu­ lous! I remember once when both Yarborough and Blakley happened to hit the same city in North Texas in the same day. Blakley took over the first three pages of the paper. Yarborough got about two para­ graphs back with the truss ads. When the Texas press was against you, it wasnlt just a question of writing editorials. Oh, boy! It was a question of just whether you were even going to get mentioned. There­ fore when a newspaperman started asking what he regarded as nasty questions or wrote a story that he didnlt like, then he immediately smelled a political cabal somewhere. He read much more into it than was really there. Secondly, he never really understood news. He knew how to make a big splash, that he understood. He would have been a great advance man for Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey Circus. But he didnlt really understand what a news story was and he didnlt realize the limitation under which journalists operate. He was always looking for Reedy -- VI -- 5

adjectives. He thought that a story should be written "Lyndon B. Johnson, tall, handsome, sincere, and with the good of the people

always before him, moved today to do so and SO." He didn't realize stories couldn't be written that way. He didn't realize also that if something happened the press had to do something about it. Again, he was accustomed to an area of the world where if something happened the press didn't necessarily do something about it. The Texas press was like that, but the Washington press wasn't. For one thing, it was too competitive, and any Washington reporter that passed up a story was going to have the situation called to his attention very quickly by an editor somewhere who would read the story somewhere else. I don't think Johnson ever looked upon the press as an institu­ tion that was there, it was going to have to be dealt with and it had to be understood and dealt with in its own terms. Time after time, he thought for instance that you could have the situation in which the White House would not put out anything except when he wanted to put it out. He tried to abolish the press briefings a couple of times by the White House press secretary, and again because he didn't understand the question of a point of contact. You know, he was not thinking. I think the major problem is that he regarded journalists as being critics and he thought that a newspaper story was a critique either in his favor or against him. The concept of news, of writing a thing because it was there, because it was something people should talk about, he never grasped it. G: Let's go on into some of these issues in 1954. Reedy -- VI -~ 6

R: Right. G: Early on, Stewart Alsop reported in his column that LBJ was circula­ ting a memorandum among fellow Democrats to layout a plan of party strategy, and this was the plan that the Democrats would not categor­ ically oppose the Eisenhower Administration. R: That was my memorandum that he was circulating. G: Do you recall his discussions with other Democrats on that? R: Oh, I recall some of them. I wasn't in on most of them. What he did, he took a memorandum of mine that I wrote, in which I said that I thought that one of the worst things that could happen would be to adopt this policy that it's the business of the opposition to oppose, and that I thought personally that the best thing was to exploit the fact that Eisenhower and the Republican Party were going to have many, many differences. For one thing, Eisenhower had been associated with so many Democratic presidents and had been in on the making of so much foreign policy that was made under Democrats during a period when the Republicans, and particularly the Republicans under Taft were opposed to that policy, that he and the congressional Republicans were just bound to be at loggerheads and that the Democrats might as well take advantage of it. Now, it made an awful lot of sense, so much sense that when he started calling Democrats in individually and hitting them with it, they just had to buy it. They didn't like it, but they just had to buy it. And it was one of the methods that did achieve a very strong form of unification among the Democrats. G: When you say calling them in and kidding them about it--? Reedy ~- VI -- 7

R: No, I said putting it to them, not kidding them. But getting them into his office and really buckling down and just putting it to them very sharply. And it was; it was obviously ridiculous at that point to adopt a stand that quote, "I am going to oppose Eisenhower," unquote, when it was so very obvious that Eisenhower was going to send an awful lot of proposals up to the Hill that went right down the line with the Democrats. G: Another thing that your memoranda point out in that early part of the year was that the farm legislation was going to be a particularly explosive issue. R: Yes. And of course when you get into farm legislation, there you have a very peculiar situation. Where is that memorandum? I want to be sure that I'm--you remember about the date? G: Let's see. R: See, one of the problems, Eisenhower really knew absolutely nothing about farm legislation, which is not surprising. There was no reason why he should. Eisenhower knew nothing about farm legislation, but he was willing to go along with Ezra Taft Benson, his secretary of agri­ culture. And I don't think Ike realized all the things that were involved in that, the most important being that Ezra Taft had come very strongly under the influence of an old friend of mine, the lobby­ ist for the American Meat Institute, Aled Davies. A1ed was one of the cleverest operators that ever hit Washington. He was a very resource­ ful, very imaginative man. I'll never forget the time that he wanted to get another year for America's meat packers before they had to Reedy -- VI -- 8

bring in so-called humane methods of slaughter. Hubert Humphrey, who was a good--everybody was a friend of Aled's--said, "No, 11m going to bring that bill up on the floor the next day, Aled, and there's noth i ng you can do about it. I got the votes." Poor Hubert, he walked into the Senate the next day and he looked up at the gallery and, damn, there were banks of Jewish rabbis with beards this long all glaring down at him, because Aled Davies had called everyone of them and told them that this bill would interfere with Hebrew ritual slaughter. I never saw a bill get pulled off the floor so fast in my life as that one. What the American Meat Institute really wanted was lower feed grain prices. Now, the whole issue as presented to the public here was between the flexible price support and the fixed price supports at 80 per cent of parity, or was it 90 per cent? The figure is unimpor­ tant. G: The Democrats wanted 90, I think. R: I think it was 90. Well, the figure was unimportant, really. What was important is that the meat producers all wanted to get lower feed grain prices for their cattle. That's where the thing really counted. Now, the politics of agriculture in those days was terribly compli­ cated, because the farm bloc was not one single thing. Most of your corn producers were also hog raisers. That gave a very peculiar thing in the Corn Belt, because in the Corn Belt what they did, they didn't make their living out of raising corn, they made their living out of putting the corn into hogs and then selling the pork. So they'd have Reedy -- VI -- 9

mixed feelings about this particular sort of thing. The cotton producers, they wanted the straight 90 per cent as did the tobacco producers. I think tobacco finally got an exemption. But this thing was being presented to the public as a means of lowering food prices. Now, it really didn't have a goddamn thing to do with food prices, because most of those basic commodities really don't go into food except as part of a long chain of things. You know, the corn that you eat is not the corn they were talking about in that agricultural bill. The corn that you eat comes from up here in Wisconsin. There are no parity price supports on it at all because the farmer sells as much of it as he produces. It's only the feed corn. The bread that you eat, the amount of wheat in it, the cost of the wheat in it is so low that if they even raised the cost of the wheat a couple of cents you wouldn't feel it. Most of what you pay for bread goes into labor costs and into packaging and into distribu­ tion. Rice never has been a problem because that's always been fairly well controlled. Let's see, corn, wheat, rice, tobacco and one other, what in the devil was it? Cotton. And of course cotton is a complex question. The big battle, as I said, was really between the meat producers and those that raised grains. And the meat producers won, they won hands down, mostly because Aled had such a very close connec­ tion with Ezra Taft Benson. G: Did these represent large packing houses, too, as opposed to--? R: No. No. I don't think the large packing houses cared because it didn't matter how much the meat cost, they were going to pass the Reedy -- VI -- 10

price on to the consumer. No, this was largely the cattle producer versus the grain grower. Even though the American Meat Institute did represent large packing houses, the primary movers and shakers in it were people like Jay Taylor from West Texas and all of the King Ranch people, the Klebergs. That was where the primary impetus came from. Now again, it was a very, very complicated issue, like so many issues, that it was not presented properly to the public and I don't think it could have been. But one of the difficulties with the thing is that it really cut through both lines. You could not really say there was a Democratic position on it or a Republican position. It depended upon what the state was primarily interested in. The Republicans from such states as the Dakotas were quite likely to be for 90 per cent of parity, because they didn't raise very much in terms of feed grain. But the Republicans from such states as Indiana or Ohio or Iowa, they'd be quite likely to be for the flexible price supports because they were more interested in the price of hogs than they were in the price of feed grains. And Ezra Taft Benson saw the issue almost as a religious issue. Ezra Taft Benson saw everything in religious terms, and as I said, Aled Davies was always at his elbow. I was very much amused by that. That was one issue where about all we could really do was get it out of the way. There was no way in the world you could get a Democratic position on it. G: Was Benson sort of a lightning rod for the Eisenhower Administration? It seems like he was terribly controversial. Reedy -- VI -~ 11

R: He was terribly controversial. Eisenhower, I think, was awfully good at lightning rods and I think Ezra Taft Benson was one of his light­ ning rods. But also you'll discover that Ezra Taft Benson's farm policies were fairly well followed. Eisenhower's main lightning rod I always thought was John Foster Dulles. That was one of the master strokes of the whole Eisenhower Administration. You know, Dulles was always walking up to the brink. I think Eisenhower kept him on a very short leash because we never went over that brink. But as long as Dulles was there, he kept the right wing quiet. And I think to a great extent that Ezra Taft Benson kept the right wing kind of quiet, too. But farm policy we couldn't win on. And Johnson wasn't terribly much interested in it himself. Johnson was much more interested in things like public power. When it came to public power, he was one of the strongest public power advocates I've ever known. He was much more interested in conservation and in reclamation projects and in things of that nature, reclamation and flood control. G: Johnson seems to have attacked Benson a number of times this year. R: Oh, sure. G: In one instance he said that the Eisenhower Administration had made the farmers afraid to face the future. R: Sure. Oh, yes. Well, Benson was a good target because nobody really liked him. I don't think he had any following outside of the Mormon Church, and while that's awfully big in Utah and Idaho and Colorado, it doesn't carry much weight in the rest of the country. Reedy -- VI -- 12

G: In launching these attacks on Benson, Johnson did not risk hostility of people like Jay Taylor and--? R: No. They didn't give a damn. They didn't care. G: Now, there was one farm issue that I wanted to ask you about here, and that was the Hubert Humphrey amendment that would prevent Benson from firing soil conservation agents, I think, who he evidently felt had some New Deal background. It was a very close vote. R: I don't remember that one. G: Let's see if I can find it here. R: I don't remember that one. G: What it did, it amounted to lengthening the terms that they served so that they would in effect outlast the administration, I think. R: I didn't remember that one. When was it? G: Well, 11m trying to find it here. R: Did I have a memo on it or you just have it in the chronology? G: It's in that chronology. R: When I get it in context I may be able to dredge up something, but I just don't remember that one. G: I flagged it here somewhere. Ah, here it is, page 32. It was

August 10, [1954J. Actually it was limiting the number of terms. R: Yes. Oh, I do remember that now. It wasn't terribly important. It wasn't a terribly important issue. G: What I really wanted to ask you, do you recall any of the maneuvering in terms of how Johnson was able to put together a one-vote margin? Reedy -- VI -- 13

R: No~ I don't recall any of it, but it wouldn't be hard to do. That would be a close one. But I can't see any difficulty in it. That would be the sort of thing where it would be terribly easy to get Democrats together. Who would be against it? I mean, it's not really a fundamental issue. It looks to me like one of those things where he

went out and drummed up--let I s see, 45 to 44, that wou ld be 89 votes. That leaves 7 unaccounted for. That means he probably managed to get all the Democrats together. There would probably be no reason for any Democrats to vote against that one. Pick up a couple of oddball votes from the Dakotas and from Nebraska and you have it made. That would be awfu lly easy. G: Perhaps it was more a question of attendance, getting people to be there for the vote. R: It was. It was. You see, most Republicans would vote for it simply because Eisenhower had asked for it, but their hearts wouldn't be in it. But at the same time, it would be a good way of registering a Democratic unity. That's an easy issue to unify on, unless your president has asked for it, and our president hadn't. See, one of the problems, there are only certain issues upon which Eisenhower really presented a target, and this was one of them. Eisenhower was no real target on any foreign policy issue, and he wasn't too much of a target on domestic issues, to be honest about it. He came up with a few bum ones, like the [Albert] Beeson appointment, that was a very important one. We almost welcomed anything where you could get the Democrats together on an anti-Eisenhower vote. There weren't too many. Reedy -- VI -- 14

G: Early on, [William] Knowland and Johnson announced a committee reorganization plan that would give the Republicans bonus seats in order to assure a numerical majority on the committees. Do you recall how that was worked out? R: Was that Knowland? G: Knowland, yes. I think Taft was already quite ill by--this is 1954 now. R: Oh, that's right, 1954. It was 1953 I was thinking about. What's the question? G: Well, do you recall his negotiations with Knowland here and what the--? R: Oh, sure. Oh, sure. G: Now [Wayne] Morse of course was left out in the cold because he was a member of neither party at this point I suppose. R: Well, Morse was left out in the cold, but he wasn't completely left out in the cold. There was a real problem involved there. It looks easy until you get into the actual mathematics of it. But the ques­ tion of what you do with members of a minor party--not a minority party, a minor party--has always been a very bothersome one. If you look up the precedents you'll discover that it went in a number of different directions. You'll find that the precedents sometimes required that the majority party deliberately take on the job of assigning the minor party the seats, and sometimes you'll find that the precedents are just the other way around. My own personal belief is that generally speaking, minor party members were usually assigned Reedy -- VI -- 15 their seats by whatever major party they had come out of. I remember the Farmer-Laborites. There were two of them when I first started to cover the Senate, [Henrik] Shipstead and [Ernest] Lundeen. Well, of course, they'd come out of the Republican Party and they sat in the Republican side of the aisle and the Republicans gave them their committee assignments. The same thing was true with Bob LaFollette and the Progressive Party. But I think what really happened, Morse in this case had so deeply offended the Republicans--Morse was a very contentious person­ ality. Morse loved to fight and he loved to ruffle feathers. So when he deserted the Republican Party to become an Independent, instead of doing what they did with George Norris--Norris had also left the Republican Party to become an Independent--the Republicans simply refused to give Morse any seats. Now, that really screwed up the works. Johnson's position was that he was perfectly willing to assign Morse a seat providing he didn't have to take it away from a Democrat. Now you see, that was the real rub, because the Senate was so evenly balanced at that particular point that there was a real problem in how. How in the hell could the Democrats give Morse a seat without taking it away from a Democrat, unless the Republicans would give them another seat? Well, the Republicans weren't going to give them another seat because their majority was so hairline thin. But for all practical purposes, what they would have to do would be to give a seat to a Democrat. They'd almost have to surrender their technical Reedy -- VI -- 16

control of the Senate to do it, and boy, that was a tough one. Those negotiations went on for a long time. G: Well, the Republicans, I gather, had to have an extra seat on every committee anyway, in order to [have a majority]. R: Yes, because you see, it wasn't mathematical. This is one of those troubles where the mathematics would require you to shave a few people in half and put half of them in one committee and half in the other. At that particular time, as I recall, the Senate rules said that every senator shall serve on two committees. It worked out all right as long as you had real majorities, but it did not work out when they were hairline, because there was no way in the world that you could divide the Senate up to reflect this one seat advantage, which is all they had. So they were given an artificial majority of one each in the committee, and that's where the problem entered in when Morse defected. G: Do you think that LBJ's considerations here were at all based on what might happen with the elections in November? R: In 1954? G: Right. Do you think that, for example, he made concessions to Knowland that he might not have made, thinking that he himself might be majority leader after November? R: No, I don't think so. I think that he expected--it was within the cards to assume that we might get the Senate back in November. All you had to do really was to take a look at who was up and who the Republicans were running, who the Democrats were running, who was Reedy -- VI -- 17

vulnerable, who wasn't. Also, the Republicans, without realizing it, worked themselves into a very peculiar position because they really had given Eisenhower more opposition than we had. So here they were. They had a very popular president. Eisenhower's popularity slumped some in 1954 because of the recession, but not much. And even so, I think that most of that slump was in areas where the Republicans didn't have much of a chance anyway and the Democrats had made some hay out of it. So I think Johnson could fairly well count on a majority of the Senate next fall. What we hadn't counted on was we were getting the House back, too. That was somewhat of an unexpected bonus. No, I think you have to approach this from the standpoint that technically it was a terribly difficult thing to work out. It was just the technical problem, you know, human beings cannot be sub­ divided, and to work it out on the basis of the ratio would have required the subdivision of some of the members of the Senate. G: Did Johnson try to lure Morse into the Democratic Party at this point? R: No. Good God, no. It would have been one of the worst things he could have done. G: Why is that? R: There are a couple of reasons. First of all, one of the things of which Johnson was deeply aware, and which many of his Democratic colleagues had lost sight of, was that out in the country people don't like the thought that they're just playing politics up there in Washington. Now, that was what was wrong with "the business of the Reedy -- VI -- 18

opposition is to oppose ll stuff. Because that would mean that every time the Democrats cast a vote against Eisenhower, out in the country people were saying, IIUh huh, they think itls their business to oppose Eisenhower. They arenlt voting against that bill because itls a bad one, theylre just voting against it because theylre Democrats. II And to have played a lot of games in trying to lure Morse into the Democratic Party, the way that would have been interpreted by the public is, IIUh huh, that Senate Leader, all hels trying to do is just get a majority so he can be majority leader instead of minority leader. II And Johnson was much too canny to ever permit something like that to happen. I was always startled at the very obvious willingness of so many of the Democrats to fall into that particular trap, where they were going to leave themselves open to a public interpretation that every single one of their votes was being cast, not for the good of the United States, but for their own individual political good or for the good of the Democratic Party. Therels nothing most voters care less about than the good of the Democratic Party or the good of the Republican Party. Secondly, I think that he kind of liked Wayne Morse in a reluc­ tant sort of a way. But at the same time I think he realized that Morse was going to be one hell of a lot of trouble to handle. It was almost better to have Morse in the Republican side than the Democratic side. But there were never any conscious--and you know, held get just as many votes out of him; it really didnlt matter what side Morse was on from a voting standpoint. Reedy -- VI -- 19

G: In Johnson's own state you had a tremendous problem with water, the drought. R: In part of the state, yes. G: And Walter Webb had published his book, More Water For Texas. R: Right. G: I notice a lot of the thoughts in Webb's book show up in Johnson's speeches, even in legislative initiatives. R: Oh, yes. But don't forget, a lot of the thoughts in Webb's book came out of that study that Harry Burleigh ran for the reclamation service, which was a study that had really been launched by Johnson. So that's not at all unusual. What you had was sort of a continuing flow proc­ ess here. That Burleigh study was really a very interesting study, because Texas was such a study in contrast. You know, after all, East Texas, the problem was too damn much water, floods, dams being washed away, whole towns being washed away. Whereas over in West Texas they had their tongues out this far trying to lap up a drop of moisture. G: Well now, Johnson seems to have approached the problem from a number of perspectives. One was trying to harness the rivers in Texas as he had done in the Tenth District. R: Yes. Now, you see the difficulty there, that was something that was meaningless west of the Colorado, because there wasn't anything in the rivers to harness. Most of those rivers, the Canadian up in the Panhandle, what you're trying to do there is to store as much of the water as you can. The Rio Grande is almost entirely a storage problem. Your harnessing problem involves the Sabine and the Trinity and the Reedy -- VI -~ 20

Brazos, rivers like that. And occasionally, of course, you get some flooding in the San Antonio River and some of those rivers in Central Texas. But that's all flash flood stuff. The overall water problems of Texas could not be solved by the harnessing of the rivers. In fact, I have yet to hear of a viable solution for the problems of the Panhandle and the South High Plains. Best thing Harry Burleigh could come up with was that idea of digging that big trench from the Missouri River, tapping it and carrying that water about, what, twenty-five hundred miles or so to get it into the South High Plains. Well, that's ridiculous. Nobody is going to go in for that kind of public works. But water was one of the problems in which Johnson really had a very deep and abiding personal interest. That wasn't just something he was doing to get elected. G: Did he talk about this more than other issues, or what makes you think--? R: Yes. He talked about it more. There were two or three issues that really obsessed him. Education was one of them; water was another. I think it reflected his background. After all, when you lived in the Hill Country, boy, you got worried about water because there wasn't much water there. Just in ordinary personal conversation, sometimes-­ when Johnson started to talk about something when there wasn't any­ thing to be made out of talking about it, you could be pretty damn sure it really was in his mind. And time after time he'd come back to that question of the water. You know, how would it bother him to hear Reedy -- VI -- 21

a tap dripping water or something like that. Held tell that story among people where there couldn't possibly be anything to be gained out of it. And I think he felt the same way about education. Those are two of his great issues, education and water. I don't think he understood education, but I think he did have some understanding of the water issue. Incidentally, are you aware of the fact that at one time he was actually interested in a project to deepen the Lower Colorado River and make Austin a seaport? G: No. Where did he get that idea? R: I don't know where he got it, but I couldn't believe it when I first heard it. I heard it through Walter Jenkins. Now, he finally had to drop it. That was too much "Fantasy Island." G: For years they worked on the Trinity River, didn't they, trying to get that deepened? R: Oh, yes. The Trinity River, though, you had a genuine problem of flood control. And of course there was some important constituencies involved there, because the Trinity River is probably the most impor­ tant in Texas in a sense because of what it does. It hits Fort Worth, it hits Dallas, it goes through some of the richest land of Texas, and it's probably the most important waterway the state has. G: Well, the idea there was to make Dallas a port, wasn't it, something like that? Reedy -- VI -- 22

R: Well, that was the idea in Dallas and Fort Worth. I don't think he cared too much about that, but he did have his heart in flood control on that river, because that river can really act up, you know. G: Did he have cooperation within the administration during the fifties? R: Oh, sure. He had plenty of cooperation. Political differences never stood in the way of cooperation as far as Johnson was concerned. If he could get a vote or if he could get some help, he would take it from anybody. He didn't care whether his votes came from Joe McCarthy or Wayne Morse or Hubert Humphrey, as long as it was a vote. Johnson would forget any political differences at any moment if he could get something done. There was very little ideology to Johnson. Johnson was one of the most pragmatic men that ever hit the American political system. He didn't always show good sense about it, but he never let ideology get in the way of something, of an objective, never. [It was] one of his great strengths, also, though, I think one of his weaknesses, too, because most people do have some strain of ideology to them. I think this is one of the reasons that almost everybody was so suspicious of him. That here was a man who had such very little ideology that they always assumed he had somebody else's ideology. For example, he would cooperate with the furthest, most racist of southern senators, white supremacists. And he would not strike some of the stands on race issues, such as, well, even an Estes Kefauver would. Therefore, since he was not all out on the liberal side of it, the liberals would assume that he was an all-out racist, and since he was not all out on Reedy -- VI -- 23

the racist side, the racists would assume that he was a liberal~ I

don't know, sometimes it balanced out, but at the same time I think this had more than anything else to do with the aura of suspicion that was always surrounding Johnson. He was a centrist; if there ever was a centrist in American politics, he was it. G: But did he tell one person one thing and another person something else? R: No, not precisely, but he would let one person believe something and then let another person believe something else. Johnson was much more subtle in action than people gave him credit for. He was quite capa­ ble of leaving a southern racist with the feeling that he could be relied upon not to let the civil righters go too far, and then a few minutes later leave an all-out civil rights advocate with the feeling that he wasn't going to let the southern racists go too far. But if you examined what he actually said, you might discover that he hadn't told either one of them anything. That was not beyond Johnson. The only time that he would ever really say things that he shouldn't say was in the course of a public speech. There he could be very bad. He could get all enthusiastic, he could start responding to his audience. You of course have read my book [Lyndon Baines Johnson:

A Memoir] and I think you Ire aware of the chapter in which I went into this question, that he really didn't take speeches seriously. He thought that a speech was a way of getting a reaction out of an audience, and, oh Lord, that got us into trouble! 1111 never forget that idiotic goddamn speech he made at Tyler, Texas on the United Reedy -- VI -- 24

Nations~ in which--you know, I had written him a speech in which I realized the problem, he had to do something to quiet the ultra­ isolationists in Texas. But by the time he flew to Tyler without me flying along with him, all of the very careful little things that I had written into it which gave him--they all went out the window, and he finished practically telling the United Nations to get out of the world, as well as get out of New York. God, the problems we had getting rid of that thing! G: Really? R: Yes. He was terrible about that. G: Well now, what did you do in this particular instance to counteract the damage that the speech did? R: Oh, live forgotten now precisely. It was one of those things where I think that he had left one of the saving clauses in, that if the United Nations doesn't do something, welre going to have to tell it to get the hell out. And of course, I don't know what it was, lid have to go back and reconstruct that one. But it was one of those things where everybody finally decided to drop it, generally speaking. G: This was I guess at a time when it seemed that at least a seat for Communist China was being discussed. R: Well, there wasn't much danger at that particular time that Communist China could get that seat. The Committee of One Million, which had been organized basically by Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota, but it had an amazing membership, guys like Paul Douglas from the University of Chicago--he was then a senator--he should have known Reedy -- VI -- 25

better, but he didn't. See, one of the troubles is that the liberals had been under such heavy attack during the McCarthy era that they, too, went overboard in grasping at anything that could demonstrate to the public that they were anti-communist. And an awful lot of lib­ erals leaped aboard the "don't let Communist China have the Chinese seat" [movement], an awful lot of them leaped aboard. There really wasn't too much danger at that point that that seat was going to go to Communist China. In fact, I think the whole nation would have been better off if it had gone to Communist China at a much earlier time. But you couldn't be sensible about it in those days. I don't know if you were old enough at that point to realize the atmosphere, but what was being built up was really deadly, it was virulent. Everybody was looking for cyclone cellars, and one of the cyclone cellars was the Chinese communists. Johnson himself was looking for a cyclone cellar to some extent, because this anti-communist hysteria reached real heights in Texas, mostly because they'd never seen a communist. G: The Republicans at that point seemed to have really been on the attack, accusing the Democrats of being soft on communism. R: Oh, sure. Oh, sure, and it worked. G: And this was one of the ways of combatting that attack? R: Yes. See, Harry Truman had handled the whole McCarthy thing very, very poorly, and so had Dean Acheson. It would not have been possible to have put anyone in a public position who could have made such a botch out of the deal as Acheson had, and Truman. In retrospect, the whole thing is rather peculiar, because the height of communist power Reedy -- VI -- 26

had passed~ There was a period when the communists really had power in this country. Boy, did they have power! They controlled a number of very important unions. They had control over the United Automobile Workers; they had control over the United Electrical Workers; they had control of the West Coast Longshoremen; they had control of the Farm Implement Workers. Their control over the automobile workers wasn't as strong as the electrical workers, and the control they had over the farm workers was nowhere near what it was over some of the other unions. But they had absolute control over the longshoremen on the West Coast; they had absolute control over the fur and leather work­ ers; that was absolute in New York, that was under Ben Gold. They really did have control over some very important writers in Hollywood, and they had control over one or two publishing houses up in New York. And if you weren't going to toe the line and go right down the line, you had trouble getting published during that period. You see what happened, it's a rather interesting thing. They had gotten this control, not on the basis of Marxism and of communism, but simply because they were on the same side as most of the liberals in the United States were in the Spanish Civil War. That was the begin­ ning of the growth of communism in the United States. The impact that was made by the Spanish Civil War in the American intellectual commun­ ity has never been plumbed with sufficient depth. There's a whole field here that should be looked into with a greater amount of care. I can remember bursting into bitter tears the night Barcelona fell. This had a traumatic impact upon America's college population. This Reedy -~ VI ~~ 27 is where the communists really did get their hooks into an awful lot of people. They might have gotten their hooks into me on that basis, except I really was out of a working class family, and when they started talking to me about the noble blue collar worker, I knew better. But an awful lot of the kids I went to college with didn't. The communists probably had well over a hundred members at the University of Chicago, and when you figure at the University of Chicago the total student population was six or seven thousand, that's pretty potent. After World War II there was a period when Russia was fairly popular in the United States, the heroic defense of Stalingrad and the defense of Leningrad, things like that. But then came the Cold War, and Americans suddenly woke up to the fact that there was genuine power. I think that the [Henry] Wallace campaign was the absolute height. After all, no matter what they say, the Progressive Party under Wallace--that's not the La Follette Progressive Party now, you have to be very careful here. But the Progressive Party under Wallace was absolutely controlled by the communists, no question about it. I covered it as a newspaperman. I can remember walking on the floor of that convention and hearing the whispers, "Here they come, the jackals of the capitalist press." That's the way they talked at that conven­ tion. Good God, the chairman of the convention was Albert Fitzgerald. He was out of the United Electrical Workers, and he didn't dare draw a breath without sending a telegram to the Kremlin first and finding out if he had permission. You know, his whole union was actually run by Reedy -- VI -- 28 two real communists, [James B.] Matlass and [Julius] Emspak. And when the American people woke up to it and when they suddenly discovered that there really had been spies in very high positions--Harry Dexter White, there wasn't any doubt about Harry Dexter White. There wasn't any doubt about Alger Hiss. There wasn't any doubt about Lee Pressman and that crew. And when the American people woke up to this they were horrified. Now, what really happened, though, is that after the back of the communist power had been broken--and it was broken; after 1948 that was the end. Walter Reuther got the United Automobile Workers back. The AFL-CIO set up the IUE, the International Union of Electrical Workers, which over a long period of time finally wrested control of-­ well, they didn't wrest control of the United Electrical Workers from the communists, but they did manage to set up a rival union that took most of the big contracts away. This was the really weird part of the height of the anti-commu­ nist fury, [it] came well after the communists had lost their power. But the fury in the early fifties was terrible. Joe McCarthy had managed to take advantage of it. Joe, however, had operated on a very interesting basis. In my course in political communications, one of the concepts that I teach is the politics of revenge, which is very important in the United States. There were an awful lot of people that really suffered the lash of ethnic discrimination, the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, all of whom were made to feel that they sat below the salt. Reedy -- VI -- 29

You know, when I was a kid in Chicago, if you were Irish, Polish, Italian, you really had some problems. I can remember when I was a kid we lived in an apartment building--not an apartment building, it was actually a two-story house. We had the upper story and a family named Robleski had the first story. There were two young girls, they must have been eighteen or nineteen, they had pretty good jobs in a law firm in Chicago. They had those jobs under the name Roble. If that firm had ever discovered there was a "ski" at the end of Roble those two girls would have been fired so goddamned fast it would have made your head swim. Even when I was going to college, I was head over heels in love with some girl whose parents, they didn't like this idea of a Reedy, that must be an Irish Catholic. That bothered them very mu ch. People don't read the Maggie and Jiggs cartoon properly. You know the whole theme of the Maggie and Jiggs cartoon was that Jiggs had made some money and Maggie wanted a social position that accorded with her husband's economic position. Well, this just wasn't to be borne. Jiggs was a sensible man. He knew that an Irish Mick had no business messing around with opera and all that kind of crap. He wanted to go down to Dinty Moore's and have a plate of corned beef and cabbage or go to the Pipefitters' Ball. The whole cartoon was highly approving of Jiggs, who knew that an Irishman's place, where it really was, and was really making fun of Maggie. That's the way the world was. Reedy -- VI -- 30

Now if you look at Joe McCarthy's communists, what they really were, you'll discover strangely enough most of them were New England, blue-blooded aristocrats. So Joe McCarthy's following, to a tremen­ dous extent, were people trying to get their revenge. Boy, oh, boy. You know, when I was a kid we had a man run for mayor of Chicago, Big Bill Thompson [?], Big Bill the Builder. And his sole campaign pro­ gram was that he was going to take the first boat to England and punch King George in the snoot. He got elected mayor of Chicago on that one. And what Joe did was to run an anti-communist crusade which was exactly the same thing as Big Bill Thompson going to take the first boat to England and punch King George in the snoot. There was an awful lot of that going around. Some of this was not really fear of communism so much as it was all of the ethnic people that had seen everybody looking at them through monocles. Some of it was that, but whatever it was, it was fierce. G: What was LBJ's attitude toward McCarthy? R: He regarded him for what he really was, which was a mountebank. G: Was he afraid of him? R: No. He wasn't a bit afraid of McCarthy. He realized how dangerous McCarthy was. A lot of people real ized that. But there was less fear of McCarthy in the Senate than the liberals assumed was there. You . know, one of the things that you have to realize, I don't know what it's like now, but the southerners during that period had a really deep reverence and respect for the Senate. They regarded it as their institution, because it was as high as a southern boy could go. They Reedy -- VI -- 31

knew that a southern boy didn't have any chance of growing up to be president, that was just out of the works. That was settled by the compromise that finished the Hayes-Tilden campaign in 1875. Now, one of the tenets of the Senate in those days was that you did not ques­ tion the relationship of a senator with his constituencies. There­ fore, in the minds of most of them, the McCarthy problem was a problem to be solved by the voters of Wisconsin, not by the Senate of the United States. If Joe McCarthy had not made the basic error of attacking fellow senators, and especially very conservative senators like Carl Hayden of Arizona, the Senate would never have censured him. G: Did the fact that McCarthy seemed to have a lot of support among wealthy Texans bother Johnson? R: No. Because most of those Texans that were supporting McCarthy were against Johnson anyway. That was no problem. G: In your earlier interviews, you have talked about the McCarthy censure in great detail, and I don't want to ask you to go through that again, but there's one question really that I want to ask you about, and that is did you ever have any indication that Johnson, in addition to selecting the Democratic members of that censure committee, did he have anything to do with the selection of the Republican members as well? R: Sure. Of course he did. He talked Knowland into it. Johnson had a very good eye for certain things. He immediately spotted the fact that a man like [John] Stennis could be deadly against McCarthy, as Reedy -- VI -- 32

could [Sam] Ervin of North Carolina and Big Ed Johnson. He knew that

Big Ed Johnson really hated McCarthy~ G: Really? R: Oh, yes. Oh, and how! G: How was this evidenced? R: Big Ed told us. I was at the meeting. When Johnson first started to discuss strategy, Big Ed Johnson from Colorado said he hated that man, if he ever had a chance to knife him he was going to put it in and twi st it north, east, south and west, that Joe McCarthy had. . No, we knew what we were doing when Ed Johnson got put on that commit­ tee. But he had apparently done something nasty, I don't know who it was, Ed never told us, to a friend of Ed Johnson's. But oh, no, if anybody ever wants to know was that committee stacked against McCarthy, the answer is it sure as hell was stacked against McCarthy. What Johnson was really looking for was conserva­ tives. He wanted McCarthy beat into the soil by conservatives. You couldn't have a liberal on the committee, that was absolutely out because--you see what Joe had done, Joe had conditioned the public to anticipate liberal opposition to him and that he was equating with communists. What you had to do was to get deep-dyed conservatives. The real lifesaver was when Joe turned on Carl Hayden of Arizona. Oh boy, we'd been waiting for that for months. We knew it was going to happen somewhere along the line. Joe was getting too big for his britches. Reedy -- VI -- 33

Joe did not understand the Senate. You know, some people never do understand the Senate. They can be there for years. Kennedy never understood the Senate. Jack Kennedy never understood the Senate and Bobby Kennedy never understood it. Ted did. Ted had a feel for the Senate, and his two brothers didn't. There are some conservatives that never understand the Senate and some liberals that never under­ stand it, and Joe was one of those. To them the Senate is just sort of a sounding board, you know, it's a stage upon which you can get an audience. I think Joe really thought that he had those people scared. They weren't scared of him. When he attacked Carl Hayden for instance, Carl Hayden didn't say a thing. And I think Joe thought that he had scared Hayden. He didn't realize, Hayden never said anything to anybody. You couldn't get Hayden to comment on [anything]. If Hayden looked out that window, he wouldn't tell you whether the sun was shining. I've often felt, you know, there's that old vaudeville gag about the man that shakes his head and it suddenly falls off, that he doesn't realize .. Well, I've often thought that happened to Joe McCarthy. He shook his head one day and it rolled off. Joe really didn't understand how tough people could be. He suddenly got it when he ran into [John] McClellan from Arkansas. Boy! That was the first time that Joe ever revealed in public that a really tough man could make him back up fast. Joe was a bully, you know; he was an Irish bully boy. Christ, they were allover the neighborhood when I was a kid, the Irish bully boy. His specialty was scaring the Reedy -- VI -- 34

hell out of you. But any time you punched him in the nose, that was the end of it. G: Let me ask you again about the Republican members. R: Yes. G: Did you have any direct knowledge that Johnson suggested, say, [Arthur] Watkins? R: It didn't surprise me in the slightest. I know I had no direct knowledge, because Johnson could really be good at getting somebody like Bill Knowland or Bob Taft off in a corner where nobody in the world would ever realize that a deal was being cooked. G: And Johnson wouldn't brag about the deal even if--? R: No. No. I never suggested those people to Johnson. The only one that I was dubious about though when they were announced was [Francis] Case of South Dakota. He bothered me; he was a worry wart. But I wasn't worried about Watkins and I wasn't worried about [Frank] Carlson of Kansas. And I don't know that Johnson did this, but I'll be goddamned surprised if he didn't, because Johnson was a hell of a lot better than Knowland was at reading people. Knowland was a very good man, but he was a mechanical thinker. Dick Russell once said about him, "He walks like he thinks," or "He thinks like he walks," I've forgot­ ten. But if you've ever seen Knowland, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, walking down the street. You can almost hear the floor tremble under his feet. He was like a tank, he was like a Sherman tank. And I don't think that Knowland could ever have selected that committee, Reedy -- VI -- 35

and the committee membership didn't surprise me in the slightest. My assumption is that Johnson put it into Knowland's mind, because he could really put almost anything he wanted into Knowland's mind. But I don't know it, no. G: Okay. Another issue related to anti-communism was the Robert Oppenheimer case. Do you recall Johnson's role in that? R: Mostly just trying to stay out of the damn thing. That was an impos­ sible case. The thing was ridiculous. Sensible people would have paid no attention to it whatsoever. I'm fairly sophisticated about this communist business. If you were a socialist back when I was a socialist, you really got to a point where you knew who the communists were and who they weren't. And I never saw the slightest bit of evidence that Robert Oppenheimer was a communist or a communist fellow traveler or anything else. But he had a brother that I think--I don't think his brother was ever a communist, but I think that his brother might at one point have been influenced by communists. You see the key to the Oppenheimer case was the whole thing was silly. Bar Oppenheimer from knowledge of the atomic bomb? (Laughter) You know, it's ridiculous. It's like saying Einstein couldn't have any knowl­ edge of the atomic bomb. I think what happened there is that that Hungarian, what was his name? The Hungarian, he became the father of the hydrogen bomb. [Edward Teller?] He worked in the project. He and Oppenheimer were at swords' points all during the days of the Manhattan Project. He was the first witness before Johnson's committee on outer space in Reedy -- VI -- 36

later years. He was the man that did bulldoze the hydrogen bomb through. But he managed to raise enough hell and he managed to con­ vince [Lewis] Strauss, who was then head of the Atomic Energy Commission, that Oppenheimer was somehow a dangerous man whose creden­ tials ought to be cancelled. It was just a bad issue. It was one of those issues that should never have been raised. Only in a very paranoid period would anybody have done anything about it at all. And it was one of those things where I think Johnson just realized there wasn't anything he could do about it one way or the other. (Interruption) G: There are two Texas issues that I want to ask you about, projects. R: Yes. G: One, Johnson evidently made an attempt to have the Air Force Academy located in San Antonio. He negotiated with [Harold] Talbott but was unsuccessful. R: Oh, sure. G: Do you recall his efforts to get that and why he failed? R: Oh, I really don't think his heart was too much in it. I think it was one of those prestige issues. He was really much more interested in keeping some of those air bases in Texas, like the one in San Angelo and the one at Austin, Bergstrom Field, and places like that. I think that if he had really just desperately wanted the Air Force Academy, you know, do or die, I think he would have gotten it. But I just don't think he cared that much about it. It was a sentimental issue, you know. San Antonio was regarded as the cradle of the air force, Reedy -- VI -- 37

Brooks and Kelly Field and all that sort of thing. But it was just sort of one of those emotional things. G: There seems to have been almost an annual attempt to do away with Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, and I know that Houston Harte was very concerned that it stay there. R: Ri ght. G: Did Johnson do anything to keep it there? R: Oh, hell, yes! G: What did he do? R: Oh boy! I think that's one of the reasons we didn't get the Air Force Academy. You know, you can't get everything. Politics is a series of tradeoffs, and I think if he had been willing to sacrifice Goodfellow, and if he had been willing to sacrifice Bergstrom and a couple of other things, I think we might have gotten the Air Force Academy. But it wasn't really worth--you know, you can't be a hog in politics, not if you Ire a national figure. If youlre just going to be a Texas senator, if youlre just going to be a Georgia congressman, like Uncle Carl Vinson, yes, then you can do things like that. But if youlre going to be a national figure, youlve got to make some tradeoffs. G: Did this specifically involve trades with other senators, do you think, or trades within, say, the administration? R: Oh, it's more subtle than that. This is one of those things where you'd have to make a very major project to trace the thing out. I think that if I wanted to go on back, if you opened up all your files to me and I could get the air force to open up all of its files during Reedy -~ VI ~- 38

that period, and if I could get some of Eisenhower's private papers and get some of Talbott's private papers, I could probably figure it out. But I'd have to fi gure it out, and it's not worth it. I can just tell you that overall, in all of the complex trading back and forth that goes on in Washington, the national [Air Force] Academy got lost and we did keep Goodfellow and we did keep Bergstrom. One of the principal problems here is the public, generally speaking, has a very oversimplified concept of what goes on in Washington. Nobody ever sits around a table and says, "I'll trade you the academy for Goodfellow, or I'll trade you Keesler Field for this." That's not the way it works. There's a highly complex business going on at all times. Anybody that gets too greedy, demands too much, somewhere along the line discovers he's not getting anything. Johnson was much more interested in getting the space center down in Houston-­ later on that was, this is not in 1953 or 1954. That wasn't an issue then. But you don't get things like that unless you're willing to be reasonable about something else. G: Another thing that he was very interested in was preventing the admin­ istration from closing the tin smelter in Texas City. R: Yes. That was a rough one. That's kind of a funny issue, because there was some genuine merit to it. That was not just solely and simply a Texas issue, although it was certainly an important one. Texas City didn't have much else at that particular point; things were really in tough shape. But nevertheless, there was some merit to it also. If there hadn't been some merit to it, I don't think Johnson Reedy -- VI -- 39 could have kept that smelter open as long as he did. See, economically it didn't make any sense, because the only reason for that Texas City tin smelter was the processing of Bolivian tin. Now, Bolivian tin was very low grade, and for a long time we were in the process of getting very high grade tin from Malaysia. The Texas City smelter had been built only because during World War II and later on, we found ourselves deprived of that very fine, high grade ore from Malaysia. And so when Johnson was trying to save the Texas City smelter, I have no doubt that probably the thing that loomed the largest in his mind was how important that was to Texas City and a bunch of constit­ uents. But at the same time that I think that he was impressed with the need for keeping something open so that we could process that Bolivian tin. With all the things that were going on in Asia--I think this may be one of the reasons why he got a little deeper into Vietnam than he should have gotten. During that whole period, he became very heavily impressed on the strategic importance of Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and strategically it is damned important. If you're look­ ing for tin, if you're looking for natural rubber--and you've got to have some even in this age of synthetic rubber--if you're looking for oil, if you're looking for bauxite, if you're looking for all kinds of things that are terribly important to the defense effort, Southeast Asia is the richest area in the whole damned world. I think that was one of the things that was in his mind. Not that he fully understood it, he didn't. But a residue held over when he first went into this tin thing. Reedy -- VI -- 40

You know, tin is a very important metal~ It's rather unfortunate that most Americans think that tin is something that is very cheap; they think in terms of tin cans, which don't have any tin in them. Tin is too damn important to be wasting on tin cans. You know, tin is one of the most vital of all metals. You can't run a navy without it, you can't run ships without it, you can't have a merchant marine without it. It's one of those things where everybody thinks in terms of cheap gimcrack things, but it's really terribly important. Now, the Texas City smelter, I think that there are a hell of a lot of constituents in Texas City. But at the same time, one of your difficulties with Johnson, it's a mistake to underestimate some of the man's emotional patriotism. He had it. On many of those issues he wasnlt being phony, even though it might so happen that the patriotic thing would also help out Texas. 11m not going to say he was uncon­ scious of that. But it's a mistake to ascribe it solely and simply to Texas politics. G: Do you have any particular memories of how he might have affected the continuation of that smelter, who he went to or what--? R: No, not particularly. Strangely enough, Gerry Siegel might help you on that more than anybody else. You know about Gerry, don't you? G: Right. R: Because I remember Gerry dealt mostly with the General Services Administration, which was deep into that sort of thing. The strategic stockpiles are under the General Services Administration. I remember Gerry going over to have a conference with the ambassador from Bolivia. Reedy -- VI -- 41

He was so terribly intrigued by [the fact that] Bolivia was such a poor country that the furniture in the embassy and in the embassy offices had been bought secondhand from some army supply stuff. Bolivia was not a wealthy nation. G: Now, getting back to the Senate itself. There was an episode in late February in which Knowland attempted to have an all-night session, on I think it was the Bricker Amendment, without discussing it with Johnson, and Johnson adjourned the Senate out from under him. Do you recall that episode and how it--? R: Not very well. It wasn't that important. G: Well, it must have been a tremendous insult to the Majority Leader to have the Senate adjourn. R: It was one of those two-day sensations. G: Really? R: It was kind of an insult. I think Knowland hadn't been thinking his way through. Again, Knowland was an awful lot like a Sherman tank, and I think later Johnson regretted it, I remember that. Later on, yes. But nevertheless at the time it was a hell of a good way--by the way, at that particular point we were still looking for things to unify the Senate Democrats, and that was a beaut. I think Johnson stepped in impulsively, and I think that if he had thought it through a little more carefully, he would have found some diplomatic way of pulling Knowland out of it. No, I remember it, I remember it, but it's not important enough for me really to recall. G: He got Morse and [William] Langer, I think, as well as the Democrats. Reedy -- VI -- 42

R: Oh, yes. But again, it's one of those issues where it just seemed like everything in the world hung on it at the time, but it didn't really. G: Let me ask you about the Dixon-Yates controversy, which was really in high gear at this point. R: Yes. G: Was this primarily a public power issue? R: Oh, in retrospect I don't think the issue was important at all. I think it was one of those straws that we were all grasping at. You could fairly well unite Democrats on the Dixon-Yates issue, and it was especially important up in the Northwest. It was one of the kind of things where about the only way you could get southern and northern liberal Democrats together in those particular days was to get some kind of chicanery involved in the issue. You know, southerners are rather perfectionists in that. The Dixon-Yates--I think Wayne Morse was the one that really kicked the thing off, Wayne Morse and [Richard] Neuberger if I remember correctly. It was one of those sort of things where you could get some southern support just because the Dixon-Yates contract smelled a little bit. I've forgotten the details now, and frankly I wouldn't look them up, because in retrospect I realize that this was just one of those things we were grasping at. It's like the Beeson nomination. Have you come across that one? G: You've talked about that. R: That was a terribly important one, because that was the first place where Johnson was able to get a unified Democratic vote. You could Reedy -- VI -~ 43

always get those southerners to go along if you could convince them that there was--the southerners get along on the basis that Beeson had lied. On the Dixon-Yates contract, I suspect that if I really went back and looked at the Dixon-Yates thing lid kind of smile, that it's one of those questionable things where--I don't think it was any big steal or anything like that. Issues like that look awfully big at the time and they serve a useful purpose, because they do give you some­ thing around which you can rally the troops. That's about all there was. G: Another thing that happened that spring was the fall of Dien Bien Phu, and of course Eisenhower's attempt to bail the French out. R: He wasn't attempting to bail the French out very much. There I was in it up to my neck. G: Were you? R: Oh, and how. G: Let me ask you to trace the developments there that year that Johnson was involved in. I know there were several big meetings at the White House, and proposals of sending men to protect the guns that were defending the bases and things like this. R: The most important single thing that I was in on was a meeting of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, and I can't give you the exact date on it. I remember it was held, it was over in that office that Johnson had on the west front, the west side of the Capitol on the northwest part. Oh, no, wait a minute, no, it wasnlt. Wait. It seems to me--where the meeting was held doesn't particularly matter. Reedy -- VI -- 44

But I am reconstructing it now more out of later knowledge. I've got sort of a different perspective on it now. I'm pretty well convinced now that Eisenhower no more wanted to go into Indochina than he wanted to swallow 1 ive toads. But Eisenhower was under very heavy pressure. The whole China lobby group, for lack of a better term, meaning Bill Knowland and Styles Bridges from New Hampshire, they were all centered pretty much around Admiral [Arthur] Radford, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that year. Radford was very anxious to go into Indochina and go to the relief of the French at Dien Bien Phu. And it raised some very interesting things. I do not know what Eisenhower actually said, I only know what Johnson told me. Apparently what had happened is that Eisenhower had asked Johnson to sound out the Senate Democrats and to see how they would react if we went to the relief of the French at Dien Bien Phu. And Johnson's way of doing it was to call a meeting of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. At that meeting Walter George, who was the ranking Democrat and was a very dignified man, he showed up and I realize now he was playing devil's advocate, because his heart wasn't in it either. But he kept presenting all of the arguments for going into the aid of the French. Boy, what a meeting that was, wow! I'll never forget Bob Kerr, who was on the Democratic Policy Committee--that was where Bob Kerr, I've told this story before, Walter George made some remark about won't we lose face, and Bob Kerr almost broke the table smashing his fist and saying, "Senator, if you'll forgive me, I'm not worried about losing my face, I'm worried about losing my ass. 1I At the end of Reedy -- VI -- 45

that meeting it was perfectly, absolutely clear that if they went to the aid at the French at Dien Bien Phu, that there was going to be trouble from the Senate Democrats. You know, Bob Kerr was a rather amazing man. He was the only man that had the guts to stand up on the floor of the Senate and fight [Douglas] MacArthur when MacArthur returned from Korea. But it was apparent from this meeting that the whole temper of the Senate Democrats was against doing anything in Indochina. G: Do you recall what Russell said in the meeting? R: Oh, Russell was against it. Russell thought we were absolutely crazy. You know, Russell's position on that was very much misunderstood. Russell said that if we went into Indochina, that our only option was to go north, just to go in money, marbles and chalk, that there was no such thing as going to the aid of South Vietnam. Russell didn't want us to go in at all, but he thought that if we did go in that we were going to be sucked into the kind of a war that the American people would not support. Russell was very clear-sighted about this. G: Was this the Korean experience, do you think, that was in the sena- tors' minds during this--? R: Very much so. G: Did they allude to Korea? R: Yes, there were some allusions to Korea. But you see, Korea was much better than Indochina, because in Korea at least you had a front line, whereas in Indochina there wasn't any real front line. At Korea you could say that there was a certain point where you could claim a Reedy -- VI -- 46

victory because you'd pushed the line north. Of course if the line got pushed south it was a defeat, but you couldn't find any lines in Vietnam. But there was very little doubt that if we had gone into Dien Bien Phu at that particular time that the Senate Democrats would have raised hell allover the place. Oh, and how! G: Anything else in the meeting? Did Johnson take a position? R: No. Johnson just sort of presided over the meeting. When it was over he reported to Eisenhower, a report I now realize that Eisenhower wanted to get, which was "for the love of Christ, don't go in." G: Well, why do you think Eisenhower wanted to get that report? R: Again, I'm putting things together now. This is not what I know, this is what I deduce. Eisenhower was out of the military school at West Point, where the number-one overriding consideration was in no circum­ stances get into a land war in Asia. That was number one. That was classic, standard military doctrine at West Point. One of the interesting things I discovered, I did some prelimi­ nary work and I discovered that Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the navy were all for going in. The air force was divided, that was the interesting part of it. The strategic air force was perfectly willing to go in; the tactical air force was not willing to go in. Lightning Joe Collins was then chief of staff of the army, and he just said he was going to quit if they went in. Nothing doing. Now, when you start thinking about it, you realize something. Radford's sailors didn't have to go ashore and wade around in those rice paddies. Collins' troops did have to go ashore and wade in those rice paddies. Reedy -- VI -- 47

The tactical air force was always close to the army. The strategic air force, what in the hell difference did it make to them, they were going to fly over and drop bombs. I know, 11m out of the 20th Air Force, I know what that means. And I think what you really had here was a classic confrontation of strategy. Again, I am deducing. American strategy in the Pacific had been based on the [Alfred Thayer] Mahan doctrine, which was that if you controlled certain strategic bases you didnlt have to worry. That as long as you had places like Pearl Harbor and maybe one or two others, that nobody could cross the Pacific and do any harm to us. Later on, when we got sucked into Vietnam--and thatls a complicated thing. I think Johnson got into that as a misunderstanding of what Kennedy wanted, but 1111 go into that later when you get to that point in Johnsonls life. But I think at that particular point that most of the army was against anything in Asia, but that Madame Chiang Kai-shek had managed to get a group of people together, such as Knowland and Styles Bridges. Now again, I am analyzing now; I am not telling you what I know, 11m telling you what 11m thinking. What I think is that after World War II, to be an isolationist was very unpopular in the United States, because the isolationists had been equated with Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo and all of the Axis powers. But I think that the isolationist theories and the isolationist feeling was still very strong. And I think what happened is that the so-called China lobby actually gave people a means of being isolationist without saying they Reedy -- VI -- 48

were isolationists. What they could say is "well, we're not isolationists. We're internationalists, too. But we want to do something to prevent this spread of communism in Asia." There was an awful lot of that. I think that's one of the reasons why you got all of these elaborate [organizations], the Committee of One Million and all the ideas that •... You see, the isolationists could say they were really internationalists; they just want more put into China, and they were going to oppose putting things into Europe as long as we didn't do something about Asia. Well, I really think that that's one of the ways we got into Vietnam. Eisenhower was under this very heavy pressure, and he couldn't ignore it. After all, you couldn't ignore Bill Knowland. You couldn't ignore Styles Bridges. You couldn't ignore that whole wing of the Republican Party. He had to do something. G: I guess Henry Luce was very much involved. R: Oh, yes! Luce was, the whole Time-Life complex was. So what Eisenhower finally wound up doing, and I think that this was a result of the report that he got from Johnson and I think it came directly from that meeting in the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. What he did was to establish--you know, the French had to go at Dien Bien Phu, that was just ridiculous. I don't think there was a damn thing we could have done about it under any circumstances. I don't think we had any force we could have put in. But be that as it may, that whole thing led to the final partition of Vietnam, to the Geneva Accords, et cetera, et cetera. I think Eisenhower managed to Reedy -- VI -- 49

somewhat neutralize the China wing of the Republican Party by adopting a policy of certain types of aid to the South Vietnamese, but aid that was not going to go as far as certain military aid. You may remember, we weren't supposed to send them war planes. I think it was mostly we were supposed to send them medical aid and things of that nature. 11m pretty well convinced that's what happened there. G: Is there anything else at that meeting that you remember? Did [Thomas] Hennings, [Theodore Francis] Green or anyone else say any­ thing that was significant that you recall? R: Not terri b ly, no. But there was just no doubt whatsoever that the overwhelming sense of that meeting was against going into Indochina. I don't think anybody was for it except Walter George, and I think Walter George was being rather formal about it. I have a hunch that to some extent this whole thing was scripted in advance. G: Because George, it seems, would have carried more weight had he really been in favor of it. R: Even I, who was not altogether in on the act, realized that George was being awfully formal. G: Now, weren't there also some conditions to the effect that if the administration went in, that it should be with the British, Australians and New Zealanders? R: Oh, yes. All kinds of crap. G: Was this just something to weight it down? R: That was all smokescreen. That was all smokescreen. G: Really? Did Rayburn playa role here at all? Reedy -- VI -- 50

R: Not that I know of. Not that I know of. Although I think that Rayburn and Johnson would have essentially taken the same stand. You see, this is one-- Tape 2 of 2 G: Okay. You were talking about Johnson and Rayburn. R: Oh, I think Johnson and Rayburn would have had the same attitude at that particular time. But this just wouldn't have gone to the House. You see, the Senate is a more important body in terms of foreign policy, and that was enough I think to give Eisenhower his excuse for not going in. I am convinced in retrospect that Eisenhower didn't want to go in, but that's retrospect. G: Yes. Nixon made a statement at that point that seemed to indicate he was in favor of aiding the French. Do you--? R: Yes, I think probably, but I think Nixon was probably straddling. I think that once--you know at that point Nixon was really kind of out of things. It became apparent very early that Nixon was not an Eisenhower favorite. That came through in all kinds of ways. From the short shrift Eisenhower [Nixon?] got when Eisenhower had that attack of ileitis and Nixon flew out only to discover that Jim Hagerty was running the government and that Mr. Nixon need not apply. I always thought Eisenhower was kind of cruel to Nixon; I don't think he particularly liked him. G: Yes. Doesn't that happen so often with presidents and vice presidents? R: Sure. Presidents usually don't like their vice president. Arthur Reedy -~ VI ~- 51

Schlesinger says, and I suspect he's right, that this is because vice presidents remind them of their mortality. But no, I think what Nixon was doing, Nixon realized that this issue wasn't going to go anywhere, but that he could make a little bit of hay with the far right, with the Knowlands and the Styles Bridges and that whole crew. G: Now, another element that seems to run through this discussion a lot was that Dulles ' hands were being tied too much, that he was not given the latitude to negotiate as he should on Indochina. R: I think that Dwight D. Eisenhower had Dulles on a leash that was--I don't think Dulles could go one inch beyond what Eisenhower wanted him to go. live revised my thinking an awful lot on Eisenhower. I used to think Eisenhower was a dope, that he was a good politician, that he was awfully good at pulling people together. You know, an awful lot of the standard thinking was that he really wasn't the genius that invaded Europe, that what he was, he was a genius that managed to keep all the Allies together while Walter Bedell Smith did the actual invasion. That part of it may be true. But in retrospect, looking back upon that particular point, live come to the conclusion that Eisenhower was really a pretty smart cookie that knew what he was doing; he knew it every step of the way. And that Dulles was there to keep the China lobby and the right wing and of the isolationist wing of the Republican Party quiet. G: Another issue before the Senate that year was the highway bill, and here this was something that Johnson pushed. Reedy -- VI -- 52

R: That was 1954, wasn't it? G: Yes. R: That was during the recession. Oh, yes, that was great. We had a chance to do something about the whole recession. Johnson had quite a few things. There was the highway bill and there were a couple of housing bills and all sorts of things about that. G: It was primarily public works, was that--? R: Yes. The highway bill was a beaut. You see, when you1re in a reces­ sion--back in those days all the economists said that highway con­ struction was a marvelous way of combatting recession, because most of that highway money goes into salaries rather than equipment. If I remember correctly, I think that the ratio was 60-40. G: Was it a question of where the highways would go? R: No, I don't think anybody particularly cared. I don't think there was any great thing there. I might add one thing. You must remember that the farm-to-market road project was one of Sam Rayburn's pet babies. Therefore whenever you had any kind of a highway bill up, you had to be damned sure that there was farm-to-market money in there. That was a pretty big one for Texas. Most of those farm-to-market roads are made out of caliche. I don't know whether you1re familiar with cali­ che and that sort of thing. But that's about the only Texas politics in it I know of, Rayburn's almost mystical devotion for the farm-to­ market road program. I think sometimes we put some money in there that really had no particular use, because it had all been pretty well worked out. Reedy -~ VI -~ 53

G: Was this something that surfaced later in Johnson's presidency under that Appalachian Redevelopment Program with all the emphasis on farm­ to-market--? R: No, I think Appalachia was something that he really felt fairly strongly about. Then when Johnson got into one of those things, he'd reach out in every direction for anything he could get that he thought might do something. He looked upon Appalachia the same way as though it were Central Texas or the same way as--you know, Johnson really was a farm boy. That's one of the funny things. Mary McGrory once had a marvelous line, "He says he's just a farm boy, which is true but hardly descriptive." It was true. Fundamentally he was a Central Texas farm boy who kind of saw the whole universe in those terms. And I think Appalachia was something rather close to his heart. He thought it was Johnson City, Texas. G: Well, he himself had ancestors I guess from that part of the country. R: A lot of them came from Tennessee. The Deshas were from Tennessee, if I remember correctly. G: Gore was a big advocate of the highway system. R: Oh, yes, of course. You mean Albert Gore? Sure. G: Why was this? R: Mostly because of the Appalachia, because of the mountains, because there was a need of opening up. I think all of the Appalachian people were that way: Tennessee, Kentucky, southern Ohio. G: Another very tight vote that involved the Democrats voting together Reedy -- VI -- 54

was all of these Taft-Hartley amendments that were offered by the administration that year. R: Yes. G: --and Johnson got 48 Democrats plus [George] Malone, [Milton] Young, and Langer to vote with him as well as Morse. This was an issue where it seems that the liberals might not have been happy with some elements, and the conservatives with other elements. I wonder how Johnson was able to get them to all vote the same way? R: I'd have to reconstruct that. That's one I better refresh my recol­ lection on a little bit. Why don't you hold that one off until tomorrow. Let me take a look at some of those memos in the morning? We're getting a little bit late in the day now. (Interruption) G: The Supreme Court announced the Brown [v.Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas] decision that year. R: Yes. G: I want to ask you about Johnson's reaction to the Court decision. Do you recall it? R: I don't remember his reaction to the decision, no, because it had been anticipated so far in advance that the reactions were already there. You see, Johnson regarded it solely as a problem. Johnson thought that integration was inevitable, that everybody knew that the Court's decision was going to be a pro-integration decision. It was one thing that had been anticipated so many years in advance that for all prac­ tical purposes there wasn't a reaction. I've even forgotten what he Reedy -~ VI -~ 55

said now~ It doesn1t matter. That had already been thought about in advance. You know, this whole thing is rather peculiar. You have to realize that Texas was not really a Confederate state, you know. There were thirteen counties in East Texas that had either a majority black population or a very high degree, maybe 40 per cent, something like that. But most of Texas really was not very Confederate, was really not very black. Texas got pulled into the Confederacy by a trick. Sam Houston was against the Confederacy, you know. They got Texas into the Confederacy the same way they got North Carolina; they managed to get a meeting of the state legislature on a day when only the Confederates were there. Otherwise they1d never have gotten either Texas or North Carolina into it. Once the states were in, of course, they went down the line and later they became kind of emotion­ ally Confederate. But I think in Texas that the issue was not quite so much segre­ gation as it was a sort of--the Texas conservatives, the ones that had once been known as the Texas Regulars, the outfit that got Texas into the Hoover camp in 1928. I think that Catholicism was a much more lively issue in Texas. I think that there was more discrimination against Mexicans than there was against blacks. Once you got away from those East Texas counties, the blacks didn1t make much difference. G: Another legislative achievement that Johnson pulled off was the increase in the REA funding authority from I think a hundred million Reedy -- VI -- 56

to a hundred and thirty-two million. That was a very close vote, again, two votes. R: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. G: Do you remember that? R: I remember it vividly. That was one of those real beauts. There was an issue where you really could unite the Democrats because, hell, all of the southerners were for REA. I donlt know of anybody that was really against REA. The only real problem with it, strangely enough, came from some Democratic areas, places like Massachusetts, New Jersey. You see, in those states the REA had never been particularly popular because they already had rural electrification. live forgot­ ten, somewhere along the line, if you dig through your files, you're going to find--I think Harry Burleigh got the figure; somebody got the figure together, I forget who it was. But what you're going to dis­ cover is that Massachusetts farms were electrified long before REA, long before TVA, long before the Missouri Valley Authority or any of those. Rural electrification had its biggest following in the South, in the Middle West and in the Far West, where it really meant some­ thing. You know, in this state it was very important. I remember my uncle bought a farm up in Fond du Lac sometime in the thirties, and he wanted to electrify the farm and he discovered he was going to have to pay someth i ng like twelve hundred dollars just to get a line run out to his house. Not to get the house electrified, just to get a line out there, nothing else. The following year, 1935-36, they started to Reedy -- VI -- 57

talk about getting an REA, a rural co-op, set up around Fond du Lac and my God, the electric company was out to his house one day after the story appeared in the papers telling him they'd sell him a line for three hundred dollars. Of course, he eventually got it from REA, just the way everybody else did, and he and his brother went ahead and electrified their farm. But that was an easy issue to get Democrats together on. You had to separate it from public power. There you had a funny sort of a thing, because you did have a lot of southerners that were against public power projects. The Georgians, for example, the Georgia Power & Light Company was very powerful. But they were all for REA. If you could separate REA from public power, you didn't have any difficulty. Now, of course again that got a little complex because you got into Tennessee, there public power was big because of the TVA. That was just a question of fast footwork; there was no miracle or anything else involved. It was just getting the issue set up in such a way that sometimes you'd want to separate REA totally and completely from public power issues, because you needed the Georgian votes or some of those. But at other times you'd want to combine it because you wanted those Tennessee votes. G: There was no parliamentary maneuver associated with any of these that you're aware of? R: Only setting the bills up the right way. Oh, you might do all sorts of tricky things. I remember at one point, and I'm not quite sure just when this was--oh, this had to be after 1955, because it was Reedy -~ VI ~~ 58

after Johnson had that kidney stone taken out at Mayo's. I remember the way we got the Kicking Horse Canyon Dam bill out was by making an agreement to let the Upper Colorado Basin out, and of course the way the Republicans got the Upper Colorado Basin was by agreeing to let the Kicking Horse Canyon Dam out. I remember that one particularly because of a funny story I'll tell you about when we get to 1955, of Gene Millikin and whether Johnson's urine was first class or not. God, that was funny. G: Why don't you tell me that while you're thinking about it now? R: Oh, God, that was funny. You may remember in January or thereabouts, Johnson had to go up to the Mayo's to get a kidney stone taken out. G: Came back with a brace I think or something like that. R: Yes. Now at that particular point there were two important public power bills. One was Kicking Horse Canyon. We wanted that. That is, Wayne Morse and all the Democrats wanted it. The other was the Upper Colorado River Basin, which some Democrats wanted but not too much, but the Republicans and especially Gene Millikin of Colorado, wanted badly. Well, a couple of weeks after Johnson came back, Millikin walked up to him on the floor one day and he said, "Lyndon,"--he always put on a very pompous act--"understand you been out at that great institu­ tion, the Mayo's. Is that correct?" And Johnson, not quite sure what was in the old boy's mind but always respectful, because Millikin, Jesus, he could turn that Senate upside down anytime he wanted to, said, "Yes, Senator, I was there." "Well, tell me, Lyndon, before Reedy -~ VI -- 59

they removed that kidney stone did they test your urine?" Johnson, wondering what in the hell goes on here said, "Why, yes, they did,

Senator. II "Well, tell me, Lyndon, what was the specific gravity?" Johnson utterly bewildered said, "Well, I don't know, Senator. I assume it was all right." "It was first class, is that right,

Johnson?" II Well , I assume so, Senator, yes. They said it was all right." "Well, tell me, Lyndon, what was the albumin content?" Johnson, "Well, I don't know, Senator." "Well, was it all right, Lyndon? Was it first class?" "Well, I assume so, Senator, because they went ahead with the operation." "Well, tell me, Lyndon, did it have a foul odor?" Johnson thought maybe the old boy was having prostrate trouble or something, just wants to talk, said, "I don't know, Senator, but it must have--" "But it was first class, Lyndon, is that right?" "Yes." "Well, Lyndon, 11m very happy to hear it was first class. live had so much of it in my face lately that I was

worried about its quality. Young man, you and I have got to have a 1 ittle talk." A few weeks later the Kicking Horse Canyon Dam and the Upper Colorado River Basin came out. That was how it was done. G: That's a great story. R: Old Gene Millikin was one of my favorite senators. I in my lifetime have known personally two tremendous minds. Millikin was one, the other was Dick Russell. But I love that story. G: The tax bill was another issue that had a very close vote. R: Which tax bill was that? G: Let me get the details here. Reedy -- VI -- 60

R: Jog my memory. G: Senator George had introduced an amendment that would raise the personal exemption from six to seven hundred dollars, and the Democrats were evidently supporting that heavily. R: Oh, yes. G: And it was rejected by three votes. There was also an administration proposal for a dividend credit of fifty dollars, or exclusion of fifty dollars. Senator [Russell] Long had a substitute for a twenty dollar tax credit, and the oil depletion allowance came up as always. But I think one of the key issues here was the George amendment, which was defeated, as I said. R: When was that? G: This was June of 1954. R: June of 1954. G: I have page 24. R: Let me get that in context, because I remember that. That was a very complicated piece of business. What page, 24? G: Twenty-four, right. At the bottom. R: Oh, yes, I remember that. That was pure partisan politics. If you really think itls important, 1111 dredge my memory, but that was just a lot of maneuvering to try to get Democrats together. You know, one of the things you have to realize is that historically about the only issues that have really consistently divided Democrats and Republicans, or at least consistently divided them for a long period of time, were taxes and interest rates. But for all sorts of reasons, you could Reedy -- VI -- 61

always get the Democratic Party together on either one, basically because the Democrats--well, basically because the Republicans started out by being the industrialization party in the United States after the Civil War, the party that wanted to promote industrialization. Therefore ultimately it came under the control of the people that owned the factories and the people that owned the businesses and the people that owned the mercantile establishments. Therefore they would have one attitude toward taxation. Whereas the Democrats by and large were left either with the developing areas of the country, like the South and the West, areas that wanted very cheap money and wanted taxes that would favor farmers and small entrepreneurs. Or up north where the chief Democratic constituency were either the immigrants or the blue collar workers, and therefore they would have a different attitude toward taxes. Consequently anybody that really worked at it could always get the Democrats together on a tax issue, and that's what this was. I'm trying to remember. It seems to me, I think that's where I wrote some kind of a minority report out of a Senate Finance Committee, which we circulated. I wrote the damn thing. It was purely politics. G: There seems to have been a hesitancy of senators on that committee to buck Harry Byrd, the chairman. R: He had to be bypassed. G: Was this the one where Johnson kept siphoning votes away from Byrd? R: Yes. You see, I went to Washington, I can still remember, believing this nonsense that you're taught in political science about the Reedy -- VI -- 62 fantastic power of the committee chairmen. That is something that in the Senate does not stand up. The House yes, but not the Senate. We had two committees in the Senate in which the ranking Democrat or the chairmen were so completely out of step it was ridiculous and Finance was one of them. Harry Byrd was just completely and totally out of step, and therefore the real powers on that committee were Long from Louisiana, Kerr from Oklahoma, and Clint Anderson from New Mexico-­ well no, not Clint Anderson, Anderson was on the other committee. That was Public Works--I've forgotten, it doesn't matter. If you could get Long and Kerr together, you had the Democrats. If you could get Long, Kerr and Millikin together you had the whole damn committee. And what happened here is everybody sort of had to step gingerly around Harry Byrd, who kind of knew what was happening. Byrd was really an anachronism. I don't know if you ever read that poem about the last leaf on the tree in the spring, but that was Harry Byrd. He belonged to another age. He was out of the Carter Glass age, out of the cavaliers. The southerners--Byrd was quality, Byrd was aristocracy. Byrd was as close as you got to that sort of thing in the South and so everybody treated him that way. But power, no. The power was with Long, the power was with Kerr, and we could almost always get what we wanted out of that committee as long as there was no personal affront to Harry Byrd. Byrd would keep his mouth shut. There was kind of an understanding there, as long as everybody treated him with respect he'd cast his votes and he wouldn't interfere too much. He'd be against it, whatever we did, but .... Reedy -~ VI -- 63

The Senate is a very peculiar body. In the House everything has to be recorded, everything has to go by the book. In the Senate there can be understandings that are just as binding as the laws of the Medes and the Persians and nobody's going to say anything about it and nobody is going to make any point. G: Now, the other committee you say was Public Works? R: Yes. G: And who was the chairman of that? R: Jim Murray. G: And he was old by this point, wasn't he? R: Oh, was he old! So that was handled pretty well by Clint Anderson. There were all kinds of things like that all around the [Senate]. The Senate is awfully good at saving everybody's face, awfully good. But the power is something else. And don't ever fall for that line about the chairman having all that power. They don It. They have the power if they have it. If they aren't in step, somebody else has it, but they Ire always treated very respectfully. You had a man like Burnie [Burnet] Maybank on the Banking Committee; now, when he became chair­ man, he ran it. He was the power. But it wasn't because he was chairman, it was because he knew how to run that committee. G: In July there was a filibuster on atomic energy. R: On atomic energy, yes. I remember that. That's another one weld better postpone. That's important, that's terribly important, because there was tremendous misunderstanding as to what Johnson did. G: He got some criticism also. Reedy -~ VI -- 64

R: He got lots of criticism. That's because the northern Democrats--the northern liberals had gotten themselves all worked up into a place where they couldn't see straight. They were mad at the southerners, so they were going to pull a filibuster. Johnson broke their filibus­ ter, there's no doubt about it, but the filibuster had to be broken because everything had been won. Let's take that up tomorrow morning. G: Okay. Good. R: Because that takes a little time, but that's important. Why don't we take off now? G: Okay. [End of Tape 2 of 2 and Interview VI]